AI Might Just Save the Middle Class
The limits to artificial intelligence are us, says an expert on employment. It could help the middle class claw back some ground and plug holes in the baby bust.
If the ancient Greeks had AI, they’d still be the ancient Greeks. Same for us.
Photographer: Benjamin Girette/BloombergIf all the tasks that made ancient Greece tick were automated — from churning out chariots to crafting ceramic vases — it wouldn’t transform the place into Singapore. The Mediterranean civilization would still be that of a few thousand years ago, not a modern Southeast Asian nation whose first prime minister rated the advent of the air conditioner as an epochal event.
Automation has, in many instances, replaced human labor, but tends not to bring forward new inventions. Much as it has benefited society and driven economic growth overall, the replication of basic human labor by machine has, nonetheless, wrought social and political dislocation. The Luddites who violently opposed technological change in the early 1800s weren’t the end of the pushback. White-collar employees without college degrees have been under fire in more contemporary times, thanks to the computerization of clerical duties. The loss of factory jobs to China, where tasks could be performed cheaper and at great scale, eroded working-class communities in key parts of the US and laid the conditions for the rise of Donald Trump.